Tuesday, April 25, 2006

The Media Ban on Repatriation of Soldiers Killed in Action

I think these two stories from the CNews website show the crux of the problem. I'm not at all pleased that the opposition and the MSM (Mean-Spirited Media) have made such a tragic incident a 'wedge' issue.

Personally, I support the 80 year old tradition of lowering the flag only on Remembrance Day, but we do live in a democracy and we should revisit such traditions now and again. On the issue of the media being present at repatriation, I absolutely agree with not allowing them access. They can broadcast the coffins being loaded to come home, they can broadcast the funerals, they can even broadcast the actual event of the death of the soldier if they have footage, but this is an intensely personal event where the family will come face to face for the first time with their loved ones that are no longer able to hug and kiss them back when they come home. The media has a morbid obsession with death and despair, but please, show some decency and allow the families this little bit of privacy in a private experience that has already been made very public.

I think on this we should respect the soldiers wishes, after all, they are the ones who are making this ultimate of sacrifices.

Thursday, April 20, 2006

MSM Declares All Out War on Prime Minister

Wow. Wowwy-wow wow wow (imagine a Christopher Walken accent). Going over through different media outlets today, it appears the MSM (Mean Spirited Media) in Canada has finally gone passed snide comments and whiny stories about how PM Harper has spurned them and now they have to work for a living. Now it is all out war. That's the only way to describe it. These 'journalists' have finally taken the gloves off and have left behind and pretense of journalistic integrity in a national campaign to bring the Prime Minister back under their leash.

Case 1: Ottawa seeks closer watch on top general from the Globe & MailYou can't prove that this large glaring factual error was accidental or not, but that point is immaterial to the story. Whether General Hillier was asked to send a copy of his speech to the PMO so the government could prepare answers if questions arose(the truth) or whether the PMO was going to censor the General's speeches(not true) is really not important the story, its basically just a ruse to open the door to allow Stephen Harper's critics to attack him as you can see in these quotes:

Chief of the Defense Staff Rick Hillier has been asked to submit advance copies of his public speeches for vetting by the Harper government, a move critics say shows mistrust of the country's blunt-spoken senior general.

Opposition reaction was ferocious, signalling that the Harper regime's at times autocratic style is wearing thin in the House of Commons.

Mr. Dosanjh, and the defence critics of the Bloc Québécois and New Democratic Party — Claude Bachand and Dawn Black — said the policy makes a mockery of Mr. Harper's promises of greater openness in government.

...

"I think it's kind of a dictatorship going on," Mr. Bachand said. "I think that is not what Quebeckers expected from Prime Minister Harper. And I think it's bad for democracy. You have to keep a certain distance, especially in national defence ... this guy is nominated by cabinet. If he becomes a puppet for the Prime Minister ... this is not looking good."

So basically the reporter wildly distorts the facts, (see CTV for Hillier's rebuttal) some might say even go so far as to misrepresent the facts, in order to allow himself and others to rip into the Prime Minister. Now look at all those quotes and remember that ALL of them are based on misinformation.

Here we have a story based solely on heresay from a biased source. Liberal aide and strategists Jay Epworth can be heard frequently on CFRA defending the Liberal party and is anything but non-partisan. The story paints him as some sort of bureaucratic staffer. But it doesn't really matter if this source is being honest or not, it comes down to a he-said-he-said situation with no supporting evidence to back Epworth's claims. To make my point I don't even have to state or imply that Epworth is lying, I really don't know, but what I can state is that any journalist should not reprint this sort of claim without some corroboration. All in All, it doesn't even matter if he was telling the truth or not, the whole story is just an exercise to once again target Stephen Harper:

Revelations about Emerson's discontent come at a time when Harper's management style is attracting increasing attention.

The Prime Minister's efforts to discredit Ethics Commissioner Bernard Shapiro — who investigated Harper in connect with Emerson's defection but found no wrongdoing — have raised eyebrows.

Also, the Prime Minister has been accused of muzzling his ministers and engaging in heavy handed information control.

Harper is also under fire for deciding, contrary to his previous arguments, to handpick the MPs who will chair the influential House of Commons committees.

All of these claims have absolutely nothing to do with the original story.

Case 3: Editorial: Harper distorting child-care debate from the Toronto StarSo now its all Harper's fault. The opposition threatening to bring down the Tory Government just last week, the numerous unions and lobbyists lying to us about fake reports and devaluing stay at home parenting, and even Liberal Ministers (at the time) inferring that parents were abusing their kids if they were raised outside of an 'early learning' centre, and its Stephen Harper who is distorting the child-care debate?

That's fair politics, as are his efforts to enlist socially conservative groups to help sell his plan. What is not fair, though, is Harper's portrayal of those who believe the money would be better spent creating badly needed child-care spaces across the country as pie-in-the-sky academics and researchers and special interest groups.

I have followed the debate and have heard Harper say no such thing. The only thing he did say is that he is willing to risk an election in order to fulfill his campaign promise of $1200 a year for children under 6. The story goes on to state the biases that it just criticized the Prime Minister over:

With the budget just weeks away, supporters of child-care centres must throw themselves and their dedication to their children into the battle to persuade Canadians that access to quality child care is not a frill, but a right of working women and, more significantly, their children.

The issue is not about day care, a term based on the clock. It's about the proper care of infants and toddlers by trained, supervised professionals.

...

It is time for a vigorous debate about the needs of children — the one group overlooked in Harper's plan. Advocates of a national child-care program need to go on the offensive and tell Canadians why so many children will end up worse off with Harper's $1,200 "gift."

The editorial then goes on to express exactly one position and one position only at the expense of the other side of the story, the very thing that it criticizes Stephen Harper over. It says $1200 a year is not enough, but at the same time says that National Institutional child-care would be? What about the majority of Canadians who don't want to enlist their kids in such a project?

So here we have three examples, two of lying, and one of, well logical pretzels, all trying to do their best to attack Stephen Harper. The language is quit derogatory and very inflammatory. The 'journalists' involved throw their own integrity out of the window in order to 'fight back' at Harper for his tough and controversial stance on how the Government and the national MSM work together. Not only are they discrediting themselves and tarnishing the entire profession of journalism, but they are falling right into the Prime Minister's plans of making reporters who employ sensationalism, personality politics, and 'gotcha' journalism unimportant and irrelevent. Who will win this war? Time will tell, but it has started and it seems that 'Harper as an egomanical dictator' will be the mantra they will use.

Global Warming Primer

There are three separate questions:

Is the planet becoming warmer? A tough question, knowing that calorimetry is the most delicate kind of physical measurement. What do you measure, when, for how long? Methods and opinions differ. Magic satellites giving you a single figure for easy comparison are wishful thinking. You need a data interpretation method, and that's where opinions and tempers flare.

Is it a long-term trend? Also a tough question. Historical data is sparse and sometimes dubious. Not to mention that the methods and instruments have changed. For instance, the Albany, NY weather bureau reports average temperatures decreasing since the start of the century. Does that prove anything? Is this a fluke?

Is the observed change man-made?Again, a difficult question. It's not like you can run a parallel experiment on a second Earth devoid of mankind, although some people are planning it. Earth went through extreme temperature swings before the first ape showed up. The Deep Core ice-sampling project showed variations of about 7C (14F) in less than a century, several times over the last 200,000 years or so. That's huge. More over, the sun activity is not a constant. Sun activity variations wiped out the Maya (see "Solar Forcing of Drought Frequency in the Maya Lowlands" and google for more.). Astronomers think that the Mars icecap hasn't grown up as large in the last Martian winter as compared to pictures sent by the Viking probes: If that's true, it's not because of human activity. Then of course there is the well-known CO2 effect. How do we separate the natural and man-made causes? What's predominent?

I don't have answers, and serious scientists are very cautious too. Good data is too scarse, and too much money is involved for rational debate.

A government submitting to the rule of experts, can lead to an unelected elite of priviledged technocrats acting as unchallenged mouthpieces that are part of the regime. You need to be careful to renew this elite and bring competition among them to avoid this phenomenon.

Most debates on the subject don't even acknowledge the existence of these separate questions.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

How to bleed an astronaut...

In a science article (see "How to bleed an astronaut"), scientists are spending millions of dollars trying to figure out a way to Take blood from arteries while in space. Apparently, doing so in the microgravity of space is tricky and potentially dangerous.

Blood is easiest to collect from veins, but this blood is on its way back to the heart and has been de-oxygenated and altered in the body's tissues. This means it is not as useful for monitoring serious health problems as blood coming fresh from the heart in arteries.

After millions of dollars, they have come up with a a thumb-sized device that collects a sample from the earlobe.

I coulda saved them all that time and money. We at alsocanadian find this the most efficient device for bleeding astronauts:

Thursday, April 13, 2006

MSM Can't Get Story Straight

Ok, has anyone else noticed that the ctv.ca website has totally gone downhill lately? Or was it always this bad? The headlines and content are usually full of factual inaccuracies, whether deliberate or accidental, but this one I think is by far the worst I have seen to date.

They contradict the headline within the... headline? Which is it? Did WTO support Canada's position or didn't they? Seems like the folks who do CTV's website just can't handle the fact that the Yanks might have a leg to stand on after all in the softwood lumber dispute. We need a resolution to this dispute, but we also have to recognize that we are partly to blame and come up with a compromise both countries can live with. I'm guessing this doesn't fit the 'anti-American' slant that the media seems to be in love with these days.

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Cry Baby McGuinty

McGuinty has ruffled some feathers among his colleagues.... left in huff.

McGuinty did not attend the second day of a meeting in Montreal, but he came under fire for his comments asserting Ontario can't afford to give more money to poor provinces.

Manitoba's Gary Doer says McGuinty should live with the conclusions of the provincially commissioned report on the so-called fiscal imbalance crafted by an blue-ribbon panel noting that "Ontario agreed to the expert panel and they chose the co-chair."

Some premiers didn't disguise their annoyance over McGuinty's decision to issue his own statement.

Belinda Leaks Liberal 'Hidden Agenda'

I was reading several news articles last week regarding Belinda's decision not to run for the Liberal leadership. Something about what she was saying just didn't sit right with me. She was talking about one member one vote. I original thought that maybe that was bugging me, since she had pushed for a less populist leadership election for the Conservative party just a short two years ago, you remember, a riding with 100 members in Quebec would be equal in voice to a party in Alberta with 10 000 members. I am so used to Liberal hypocrisy and duplicity by now that it couldn't possibly be that which was bothering me so much. Then I went back to the source and reread the story, from CTV and when I looked over this quote from Belinda it hit me.

And I would rather see a Liberal Party with millions of members where each and every individual has a direct vote.

Now we all know that Belinda was the head of a major corporation so she couldn't be dumb enough to mistake the number of Liberal members to be in the millions instead of the hundred thousands of members currently (stop snickering, work with me here people!). So why would she make such a huge blunder? What if it wasn't a blunder? I started digging into this to try and get to the bottom of it and was shocked at what I found.

It turns out the Liberals have been formulating a secret plan to issue Liberal membership to every Canadian, whether they want it or not. Every man, woman, and child would be required to pay their membership dues annually and volunteer for the Liberal party. They couldn't announce these plans yet as the population is still unwilling to be enslaved, but they did plan on slowly introducing more nanny state initiatives, such as national childcare and public monopolies on health care, until the population was so dependent on a Liberal government that they had no choice.

We can see early experiments on how this evil plan could be carried out as the Liberal party was already secretly collecting membership fees, or Liberal 'sponsorship' in Quebec for the last decade.

Its Official: This Blogger Supports Bob

After yesterdays shenanigans with Bourques's headline "Raw Personal Ambition Goads Rae to Run" I mused whether I should officially endorse Bob Rae for Liberal leader. I wondered if he became leader, would the Bourques of the world torpedo him like they did with Martin during the last election. Well today is a brand new day, and yes, it seems there are others who would divide the Liberal Party once again if Rae were to become leader.

Obviously this should be taken with a grain of salt as Peterson is not only still mad that he lost to the worst Premier in Ontario history, but that he is also supporting Michael Ignatieff's candidacy.

Would the Liberals rally around Rae if he manages to win? Or would they leave him blowing in the wind as they did Paul Martin. Time will tell, but I think any Conservative should put Rae at the top of their lists for Liberal leader.

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Bourque Likes Bob As Much As Paul

We all know that Pierre Bourque, from Bourque's Newswatch, is pretty friendly with the Liberal Party and he only slanted his headlines during the election because he hated Paul Martin. Well maybe part of it was he was following the media's central plot of the Liberals as the gang who couldn't shoot straight but I digress.

Well today he had an interesting headline that did in no way portray the actual story it was linked to. Does this means that if Bob Rae wins the leadership, Bourque will once again slant his stories against the Liberals during the next campaign? Is there anyway we can get Warren Kinsella to commit to this 'arrangement' as well? With his abysmal record as Ontario premier, I might have to consider switching my support from Stronach to Rae, although Brison and his Income Trust shenanigans keep him in the running. It's been real nice to be a conservative the last few days.